Emirate of Bukhara

Between 1785 and 1920 the Manghit dynasty, an Uzbek tribal family, ruled the Emirate of Bukhara from the old city of that name in Central Asia. Its heartland was the irrigated valley of the lower Zarafshon, in what is now Uzbekistan, and at times it reached into today's Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. It fell under Russian control in the 1860s and was overthrown by the Red Army in 1920.

The Manghits had held the real power in the Khanate of Bukhara since the 1740s through the office of ataliq, a kind of chief minister, while puppet khans of the old Genghisid line kept the throne. In 1785 Shah Murad openly took power himself. Because the family could not claim descent from Genghis Khan, its rulers styled themselves emir, an Islamic title, and based their legitimacy on religion rather than lineage. Local writers did not speak of an "emirate" at all, preferring older names such as Mawarannahr, "the land beyond the river".

Emir Nasrullah, who ruled from 1827 to 1860, won the throne in a struggle with his brothers and spent his reign fighting rebellious chiefs, the rival Khanate of Kokand and the independent-minded town of Shahrisabz. Under him the emirate reached its widest extent, with around thirty provinces. As Russia advanced from the north and British India from the south, he became notorious in Britain for executing two British officers, Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly, in 1842, and later Russian and Soviet historians called him the "butcher emir". Military reforms from 1837 created regular infantry and an artillery corps.

Estimates of the population vary, from 2 to 2.5 million in the nineteenth century to around 3 million in the early twentieth. Most people were Hanafi Sunni Muslims, and Naqshbandi Sufi orders were strong, but there were also Shia Muslims, many of Iranian slave descent, Ismailis in the Pamirs, Bukharan Jews and a small Hindu community. Society joined Turkic tribal clans, who supplied the rulers and soldiers, with Persian- and Turkic-speaking townspeople and farmers, and bilingualism was common. Persian was the language of the court, and Bukhara, called "the Noble", was a famous centre of religious learning.

The Russian conquest of Central Asia soon reached Bukhara. Under Emir Muzaffar, Russian forces defeated his armies at Irjar in 1866, and in 1868 General Konstantin von Kaufmann took Samarkand and won again at Zerabulak. In June 1868 Muzaffar accepted a treaty that ceded Samarkand and other districts and left Bukhara dependent on the Russian Empire; a further treaty in 1873 tightened Russian control, and the emirate is often dated as a protectorate from then. That year the Russians also forced an end to the slave trade, though slavery itself survived until later.

Under Russian protection Bukhara exported cotton, wool, silk and karakul lambskins. Reformers known as the Young Bukharans found the last emir, Muhammad Alim Khan, unwilling to share power and sought help from the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. A first Red Army attack in March 1920 failed, but between 28 August and 2 September 1920 Soviet troops under Mikhail Frunze bombarded and stormed the city. The emir fled east and eventually to Kabul, where he died in 1944, and the emirate was replaced by the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic. In 1924, when the Soviet Union drew new national borders in Central Asia, its lands were divided between new Soviet republics.

Shown on our maps as the Bokhara Khanate, it appears in 1878 and 1880. By then it was a Russian dependency, largely encircled by the Governorate-General of Turkestan, with the Khanate of Khiva to the west.